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An anonymous reader writes "Hundreds of cyber security experts from across the EU are testing their readiness to combat cyber-attacks in a day-long simulation across Europe today. In Cyber Europe 2012, 400 experts from major financial institutions, telecoms companies, internet service providers and local and national governments across Europe are facing more than 1200 separate cyber incidents (including more than 30 000 emails) during a simulated DDoS campaign. The exercise is testing how they would respond and co-operate in the event of sustained attacks against the public websites and computer systems of major European banks. If real, such an attack would cause massive disruption for millions of citizens and businesses across Europe, and millions of euros of damage to the EU economy."

What exactly are they doing? I can think of no way of 'simulating' a massive DDoS short of actually doing it. The only possibility I can see is that they are testing the protocols management put in place regarding who talks to who to make sure that the government advisors are kept informed - lots of phone calls along the lines of 'I'm attacking your mail server, pass it on.'

They simulate it like the military simulates casualties I suppose. "That guy's dead, now carry him".You don't actually have to DDoS, the problem is the infrastructure around the systems, that people don't know what to do.The systems are supposedly down, so there is not much to do about it but trying to get them up again and that is a different exercise I'd think..

If someone is really out to hurt the infrastructure an DDoS attack is not that efficient. A shovel do much bigger damage if applied on a couple of strategic fibers. DDoS attacks is just nuisance and putting all efforts into stopping those but forgetting just how much damage someone malicious can do easily IRL is rather stupid.

Ten people that cuts a bunch of fiber could black out most of Sweden with ease if they just snip the right ones.